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The Streets

Anthony Quinn is a terrific storyteller. He has a thrilling knack for turning familiar periods of history into something surprising and often shocking, and for making the fortunes and misfortunes of his characters matter. His earlier book, Half of the Human Race, centred on the restless society of pre-First World War Britain. For his new novel, The Streets, he has chosen the poverty-riven alleys of Dickensian “outcast London” to portray a world where outward respectability disguises inner corruption, and loyalty and trust can prove to be precarious and dangerous qualities.

Twenty-one year old David Wildeblood has arrived in the capital to join a team of young men who work for Henry Marchmont,

a newspaper proprietor. Marchmont’s “restless curiosity” for investigating Somers Town, the slums behind St Pancras where ‘the beggar and the banker rub along cheek by jowl’, coexists with his compulsive habit of gambling with fortunes, both financial and mortal.

David’s own secret criminal past enables him to master the arcane street slang of the slum dwellers’ community while filling him with a potentially disastrous recklessness. He soon forms a bond of indissoluble strength with the artfully dodging costermonger Jo and falls for Jo’s beautiful sister Roma, whose existence she acknowledges is “not livin’ ... just lingerin’.”

This is a desperate world where rats are roasted on street braziers, where discarded stubs of cigars can be sold for the next meal and where human pride dictates that money for food and rent must be forsaken for the price of a decent burial. Fear scents these streets like a noxious gas, and the chapter devoted to the post-Hogarthian horror, as well as the bleak humour of the workhouse, is unforgettably disturbing. But corruption is not only endemic in the hope-deprived lives of the poor. David’s godfather, City banker Sir Martin Elder, comfortable in his Kensington mansion, introduces his godson to a bunch of ostensibly reputable bureaucrats whose evasive political agenda on city rent levels provokes a suspicious David to investigate.

And yet within all this physical and spiritual murk, Quinn shows how beauty and hope can still survive, whether in the transitory sight of a velvety cream-and-brown butterfly “wheeling and toppling through the soft air”, in the brotherhood of male friendship, or, most enduringly, in redemptive, romantic love.